ZUMO, ZOTE & ZANAHORIA - the end of the A-Z Challenge.

ZUMO in Spanish means juice.  I begin every day with a walk, a shower, and then breakfast, which always has to start with fruit juice. Oranges are around a euro a kilo and make the perfect base for whatever other fruits are in season.

Bananas - we bought some of these this morning at the local market -

mangoes,
strawberries,
or papayas.
This papaya tree is just up the road from where we live - I didn't know before I saw it on one of my morning walks that the fruit grows directly from the trunk.

Continuing my Spanish words theme - here's another one.

ZOTE is a Spanish word meaning dimwit, though whether that is a strong enough word to describe the people who deliberately set fires. Every summer our bomberos – most of whom are volunteers - have to fight to save homes, livestock and crops from total destruction. The fact that they eventually succeed, despite the difficult terrain of steep barrancos and inaccessible cliffs, is a tribute to their courage and training.

                

I love the way words can still surprise me, and here’sanother Z word I found.

ZURCIR = to darn. I presume this means mending socks but, like the expletive “Darn it!” in English, another version is used colloquially – “¡las zurcan!” means “to blazes with them!” which ties in nicely with the previous paragraph.

ZANAHORIAS  are carrots - this was one of the words it took me a long time to learn when we first arrived. 

This road sign in Las Galletas amuses me. The road is about ten metres long, one step from the beach, and the rest of the alphabet is nowhere to be seen - every other road in this small village is named for some dignitary with three names. Calles A to Z would have made life much easier!

AND FINALLY

Until a few years ago all cars registered in Tenerife had the prefix TF followed by four numbers and then letters indicating the year. 

This one is about 20 years old, but bang on target for my final A-Z post.

If you've stayed with me throughout the A-Z Challenge, thank you - your encouragement has kept me going - and if this is your first visit, welcome and feel free to browse.

 My experience of this year's blog-fest has been like the curate's egg, but thank you to the A-Z Team for their sterling work. I shall continue to visit as many blogs as I can, but I am flying to England on Friday for a fortnight with family and friends, so forgive me if I fail to respond immediately to any comments left on my blog. 

A-Z challenge B = BANANAS

DAY TWO OF THE A-Z CHALLENGE 2015

To people of my age (blushes girlishly and declines to reveal exact figure) BB = Brigitte Bardot, but since I joined a writers' forum those letters represent another A-Z Challenger. Check out her blog about Rome.  http://atozofrome.blogspot.co.uk/

BB and I share a passion for bananas, though the reason why is lost in the mists of time.
The following photographs represent the life-cycle of a banana from flower to fruit.

This is only a small tree in our community garden but the flower was half a metre long.

Here the petals are curling back to reveal the individual hands of infant bananas.

Almost ready to ripen in the sun.

Inside a banana plantation - the plastic bags are to protect the bunches when they are cut and loaded onto lorries. Each bunch is almost more than a strong man can carry. The plants are chopped down and recycled to mulch next year's plants which are already growing alongside the parent plants.

And this is an external view - the covers are to keep humidity in and prevent sunburned plants! So next time you fly into Tenerife, you will know what those acres of beige are all about.

In our local market we buy Grade 2 fruit - the ones deemed not good enough for export. They taste fine to us - and occasionally we get more than we bargained for - Triplets!

GO BANANAS!

A few drops of rain and the banana plant in our community garden bursts into flower. It's a plant, not a tree - actually it belongs to the herb family!

The spectacular flower is about 50cm long and a lovely purple colour. 

As you can see, the first petal is just starting to curl - what happens next is amazing.

Beaneath each petal nestles a tiny hand of bananas waiting to be fertilised.

At this stage they are all straight and pointing downwards, but that changes as they grow and ripen. We have watched our own plant produce a small bunch each year, but the sight of thousands of bananas growing inside a plantation is fascinating - next time you're in Tenerife, take a guided tour.

Eventually all the petals fall off and as the bananas grow they curve upwards to reach for the sunlight. You need to be strong to carry one of these huge bunches on your back as the plantation workers do., but it's the only way to get them to the lorries undamaged.

Canarian bananas are smaller than the American ones and much, much tastier. Since the Banana Wars, when America tried to price their rivals out of existence, Canarian bananas are making a comeback - and rightly so.

Each week we buy some from the local farmers' market where they sell 'Grade 2' - those that haven't reached export standard. 

We're not complaining - they're just as delicious.

So there you have it - my thought for the day - go bananas, Canarian-style!

SHOW AND TELL SUNDAY

poinsettia

First things first - apologies for absence. I have been busy lately rewriting a novel - I'll tell you about that another time - and my blogs have been infrequent, to say the least. So I have decided to kick-start it again with a "Show and Tell Sunday", and if I have any followers and visitors left, please leave a comment to encourage me to continue!


Christmas is coming in Tenerife as well as the rest of the world, and one of our first signs is the poinsettias coming back to full colour in the gardens. We also have Los Reyes - The Kings - waiting on the roundabout to be lit up at night.


For those of you who have been following the avalanche story - here is this morning's set of photographs.
When the workmen told me it would take twenty days, they should have added 'probablemente' - this is manana country, after all!


People have been blaming the rock-fall on the heavy rain we had two days earlier - our first in over a year - but I think it is more likely to be due to the banana plantation perched on top. This is a closeup of the cliff through which they cut the access road when building the autopista 25 or so years ago -  Huge rocks, so heavy that I cannot lift a head-sized one - interspersed with gravel layers riddled with holes in which the local pigeons nest.

Twenty-five years of steadily-seeping water - we are lucky there wasn't a school built at the base of the cliff.

Steady as a rock? I will never use that phrase again without visualising this - and  yes, that side road really IS that steep!

BANANAS!

This is the fruit and veg we bought for the weekend, all locally grown. Potatoes, batata yema huevo, oranges, lemons, mangas - I have yet to discover the difference between mangoes and mangas - and bananas.
That's real bananas off a banana tree, still warm from the sun and possibly with a few insects adhering to the sticky bit at the join. Delicious.
So why would anyone buy these that I saw later, lurking in the freezer of our village supermarket? Frozen peeled bananas in Tenerife?
Please! Do me a favour!




My morning walk was particularly fragrant today - after yesterday's severe gusts of wind there were so many peppercorns littering the pavement that I couldn't help but walk on them.

Imagine inhaling the scent of crushed fresh peppercorns at every step.

And then to top it all the yucca was in flower, reminding me that on my next visit to the Venezualan greengrocer I must buy some yucca - nothing thickens a stew better.

What veg and fruit did you buy for the weekend?

Turn your back for a minute...

 ...well, a month, to be fair, but they've been changing things while I was away.
Down in Las Galletas, a coastal village about eight kilometres from our home, the Government department "Costas" (Coasts) has been busy demolishing buildings that encroach on the beach.
That pile of rubble on the right was a two-storey villa, and the pink three-storey block of apartments is due to go soon.

Next to that is another weird construction with wonky walls which has been there at least thirty years. It's not beautiful, but presumably it has been somebody's home all that time.
Beyond that an Italian restaurant extends onto the rocks - how much of that will be demolished is anyone's guess.
We are all hoping that the tiny fishing cottages which have recently been converted to small holiday homes will survive - they were there long before Costas decided that the coastline should be cleared to "improve the environment" - or maybe, say the cynics, just improve the view for tourists? In other coastal villages whole streets have been demolished, leaving families homeless.

 Further along the promenade, two sewage outfall buildings remain untouched - although as workmen have been extending pipework out beyond the harbour for a year, maybe these ugly blocks are due for the chop eventually.
Who knows?
Meanwhile, this is the view from one end of the promenade - let's hope it improves soon.

And in our community gardens, two banana plants  which showed no sign of even a bud before I left, have produced flowers and bunches of immature bananas in a month - I knew they grew fast, but this took me by surprise.

So, like I said - turn your back for a minute and everything changes!

WAVING GOODBYE and Ripening Bananas

Waved goodbye to my little girl this morning at the airport - seems like only yesterday she arrived. She and her husband had a lovely nine days full of little adventures.
A chimpanzee at the Monkey Zoo wanted a grape so he offered Debs a twig in exchange. She's taken the twig home, of course - it's not everyone who can boast that they traded with a chimp.
We got blown around watching the kites and windsurfers at El Medano, where I took this photograph, and in Masca a gecko ate a bit of chewed fresh almond from Debs' hand. They experienced a calima, so now they will be more sympathetic when I complain. They have eaten a delicious steak at El Candil de Abuela, deep-fried calamari in Las Galletas, and Mongolian grill in Los Cristianos. We've had roof-terrace family barbecues, pizzas from Mercadona, fresh tuna steaks and a few glasses of wine and lots of tea. All in all, a lovely time.

Our guided tour of a banana plantation prompted a few followers to remark that "bananas ain't as good as they were". How true. But as long as the Great British Public continue to demand their bananas big and straight, that's what they'll get, and they will come from America, that land where everything is bigger and therefore must be better (?)
Exporters regulate storage temperature to delay or hasten ripening, and if they get the timing wrong you end up with fruit that's green one day and pulpy the next. We buy ours from the grower, and the flavour is exquisite. Even in tropical heat they last well over a week.
Every banana plant in America came originally from this side of the Atlantic, but all the cross-pollination to increase their size has spoiled the flavour. And not long ago there were the Banana Wars. when the Yanks tried to freeze every other producer out. It's a cut-throat business!

BANANAS!

Yes, he does look a bit cross, doesn't he? but this is the lovely Kev, our guide for a free trip round a banana plantation yesterday. A coach picked us up, along with about two dozen others, and after a glass of Bucks Fizz and a demonstration/sales pitch about pure Merino wool bedding, we were taken to a HUGE plantation - acres and acres of banana plants under those ubiquitous plastic tents that keep moisture in and the sun out.


We had to be careful walking along the paths because if you hit your head on one of those banana flowers, it hurt! And they leak a sticky residue too, so the path looks as if a car has been garaged there every few yards, leaking oil.

The life cycle of a banana plant - and it is not a tree but a plant of the herb family - runs thus.

A new plant grows from a bud on the parent plant, which is also busily producing it's one flower.
As each petal curls up, dries and drops off, a tiny hand of bananas is revealed pointing downwards, until there is a whole bunch. The bananas slowly curve upwards seeking the sun, and then it's just a matter of waiting for them to soak up enough water to grow until the bunch weighs 60-80 kilos. They are cut green and ripen according to the temperature they are stored at.
The parent stem drains its water content back into the soil, the stem is chopped down to create a mulch, and new year's stem begins to grow a flower. Each plant produces a stem and a flower once every nine months for around six years before it is too weak to continue, but it's offspring survive from generation to generation.
And the Canarian banana is the best and tastiest in the world - small, curved and full of flavour, not huge and straight and tasteless.






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